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At the conference call for Apple's third quarter earnings, repeated mention was made about a "future product transition" that would impact margins for the current quarter. What was not mentioned was the immediate impact it would have on Apple rumors. Rumors of price cuts, iTablets, MacBook touches, and more have resounded across the Internet tubes and into the cocked ears of Apple fans everywhere. The latest comes from Computerworld and Seth Weintraub, whose summation of "insiders" talk for the MacBook includes:

Thinner, rounded design

Glass trackpad—no, seriously

Aluminum case

Late September release

And those are the serious rumors. He also speculates about the Pro laptops, talking crazy about the MacBook Air using Intel's Atom, and the rumored MacBook Pros using Intel chipsets. Centrino 2 and Montevina in Apple laptops, how crazy would that be?

As such, people familiar with these plans say an upcoming generation of Macs, led by a trio of redesigned notebooks, won't adopt the Montevina chipset announced as part of Intel's Centrino 2 mobile platform earlier this month. What's more, those same people suggest the chipset employed by the new wave of Macs may have little or nothing to do with Intel at all.

That's right. The next hardware transition will be away from Intel chipsets—but not CPUs—and towards... something. AppleInsider speculates that Apple could return to making its own chipsets, possibly using IP from the recent acquisition of PA Semi, or maybe AMD or Via, but oddly nothing from NVIDIA. The latter would be a better fit, according to the musings of our own Jon Stokes, who also refuted the assertion that "Intel would need to grant the Mac maker a license to use its CPUs with alternative chipsets." For that matter, he thinks "this smacks of more fanboi 'apple makes their own hardware' fantasy."

Perhaps there is a larger point here somewhere, that Apple and fantasy go together like white suits and midgets.